Christmas Books: Jack Frost by William Joyce

Readers of The Jade Sphinx are well aware of our high regard for well-crafted children’s literature.  The genre boasts works that demonstrate all of the best that was said and thought in the language – think Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan or The House at Pooh-Corner – and has carved out a singular literary tradition of its own.  The United Kingdom and Continental Europe owns this literary franchise (from the days of Grimm’s Fairy Tales to today’s own Harry Potter), and any serious discussion of the genre returns again and again to several key, European works.

Fortunately for us here in the United States, we have enjoyed our own golden age – but the tradition stateside has really been in fabulously-illustrated picture books.  Our great prose fantasist was L. Frank Baum (1856-1919), but most American masters have a special magic for merging word with image, and they have created art of a very high order.  For the last 50 years or so, the US has been home to some of the most fertile, creative and artistic book creators in the world. 

The fullest contemporary realization of this great tradition is the Louisiana-born William Joyce (born 1957).  We have been watching his work with great interest, and he has not lost his ability to continually surprise us.

After decades of beautiful and evocative work, Joyce has concentrated on his magnum opus, The Guardians of Childhood series, which chronicles the beginnings of such childhood gods as Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and the Sandman.  The series has included both prose novels and picture books, and unified his own cosmology, much like Baum’s world-building Oz books.  The latest installment in the series is the lavishly illustrated picture book, Jack Frost, created in collaboration with Andrew Theophilopoulos.

As his narrative has crossed several mediums (prose novels, picture books and a feature film), Joyce has had to juggle elements between episodes to maintain a fully-realized whole.  Jack Frost provides the bridge between the character Nightlight as seen in the books and Jack Frost, who served as the focal character of the feature film.  But as a key segment in the ongoing narrative, or as a stand-alone picture book, Jack Frost is terrific entertainment and a delightful addition of the Guardians saga.

In short, Frost tells how the heroic sprite Nightlight sacrifices his life to protect the infant Man in the Moon from the soul-crushing evil of the series villain, Pitch.  (That’s the Boogeyman to me and you.)  Nightlight saves the day, but at terrific cost.  He resurrects as Jack Frost, but has no memory of his former self or mission.

What follows is some of the most haunting and resonant themes in the Joycean canon – that of death and resurrection as well as continual change and growth.  Frost feels Olympian isolation and loneliness, and as he does, he leaves cold and frost in his wake.  This winter of the soul becomes actual winter weather for humankind – until that grief and mourning can be rechanneled into healthier, more positive energy.

Joyce accomplishes this miracle with great economy of language; he has also retained the lush blue-gold European palette of the series, paying homage to the Continental roots of many the of Guardians.

The series will continue with additional prose novels and picture books, and one wonders how Joyce will conclude his epic in the books to come.  There is the sense that the Guardians of Childhood is a mid-career summation of Joyce’s artistry, of his deepest-held beliefs, and his untiring optimism and energy. The Guardians of Childhood is a magnificent monument to a kind and benevolent genius, and an important influence on young hearts and imaginations.  More, please.

Jack Frost is available in bookstores everywhere, and is highly recommended for the young (and young at heart) this holiday season.

Sandman and the War of Dreams, by William Joyce

Regular readers of The Jade Sphinx know that we take our Christmas here very, very seriously, so it is with great delight that we announce that prolific author, illustrator, animator and filmmaker William Jocye (born 1957) has released the next prose novel in his ongoing Guardians of Childhood series, Sandman and the War of Dreams.  It is, in a word, marvelous.

For those of you who came in late: Joyce has undertaken to create a series of books – both picture books and prose novels – that chronicle the origins of the great heroes of childhood, including Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, the Man in the Moon, and the Sandman.  In doing this, he does not fall into the trap of presenting the mixture as before, but, rather, creates a whole new persona and background for each classic figure, making it wholly his own.  (Did you know that the Easter Bunny is the last of a race of brilliant warrior rabbits?  Or that Santa Claus was raised by Cossack brigands?  If not, read on….)

Brazenly, Joyce ends his novels with edge-of-your-seat cliffhangers.  In the last book, Toothiana Queen of the Tooth Fairy Armies, the heroine, Katherine, was kidnapped by Pitch (the Bogeyman) and his daughter, the beautiful and dangerous Mother Nature.  Our heroes return to the magical land of Santoff Clausen to regroup, convinced that Katherine may be lost to them forever.  However, just when things look their darkest, out of the night (literally) comes the newest Guardian to join their ranks, the Sandman.

Or, to be more precise, Sanderson Mansnoozie.  Awakening from a sleep of eons, Mansnoozie is one of the last of a great race of star-faring Star Captains.  Or, as Mansnoozie explains, As a star pilot, I belonged to the League of Star Captains, a cheerful brotherhood devoted to the granting of wishes.  We each had a wandering star that we commanded.  In the tip of our star was our cabin, a bright compact place, much like an opulent bunk bed.  We journeyed wherever we pleased, passing planets at random and listening to the wishes that were made to us as we passed.  If a wish was worthy, we were honor-bound to answer it.  We would send a dream to whomever had made the wish.  The dream would go to that person as they slept, and within this dream, there would be a story…

The book combines Joyce’s taste for swashbuckling adventure with his usual goofy humor – almost as if Soupy Sales were writing Robin Hood.  Chapter titles include The Dreams That Stuff Is Made Of, The Sandman Cometh and, my favorite, Do Be Afraid of the Dark.  And while the story further complicates and expands the overarching story, Joyce never loses sight of what makes his characters tick.

Sandman is part of an ongoing effort by Joyce to make a children’s cosmology, and has, within the pages of these books, created a fully-realized fantasy world.  It has pep and zest and a zany sense of humor – and is more reminiscent of L. Frank Baum’s Oz stories than any other contemporary series that I know. 

Sandman is the darkest book in the series, thus far.  In it, we see the horrific events that turned one of the great leaders of the lost Golden Age into Pitch, and how violence and hatred can warp even the most noble souls.  The book also resonates most deeply on the sense of a passed Golden Age, an Age of Wonders.  Children’s books are often the inkblot test upon which we see a multitude of meanings, and I cannot help but think that Joyce – consciously or not – is mourning for the marvels of the 20^th Century, the Great American Century, now passed forever.

The book is wonderfully designed.  Joyce provides a series of charcoal and pencil drawings (so different from his lush, colorful, classic Americana paintings), and the middle third of the book (a flashback) is on black paper printed in white type.  The images here have a certain magical quality that seems far removed from most fantastic fiction for children; they are more primal and have a sense of … urgency that is usually missing from Joyce’s work.  Sandman is not a book to be forgotten quickly.

It is perhaps not surprising that the strongest entries in the series have all been about the “second tier” figures of the kiddie pantheon: to most children, the Tooth Fairy or the Sandman or the Man in the Moon are little more than names, but free from other conceptions of the characters, Joyce makes them startlingly original and alive. 

In the previous novel, he created a Tooth Fairy that was a figure of otherworldly delicacy and beauty.  With the Sandman, he creates a figure of surpassing strangeness.  Mute (he communicates through dreams and symbols), Sandman is of benign and beatific aspect.  But he also strong, resolute and brave – equal parts Harpo Marx and John Wayne.  As such, he is a wonderful creation and a worthy addition to the Joyce canon of children heroes.

The Art of Rise of the Guardians

Many movie-goers leave an animated film amused or moved or (all-too-frequently) indifferent, but few spare a thought for the incredible amount of work involved in creating it.

Such is not likely to happen with the current animated film Rise of the Guardians, which seems to be the one film to emerge from 2012 that may be a holiday classic for years to come.  One of the most beautifully designed animated films in recent memory, Rise brings to life several of childhood’s most cherished figures, including Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, the Sandman and Jack Frost.  (Not to mention Pitch, the Boogey Man!)  Such reinvention does not happen without careful artistic consideration or much thinking and re-thinking.

Fortunately for those who cannot get enough holiday spirit (or insight into that remarkable alchemy that is animated films), a new, deluxe coffee table book is there to tell you all you need to know and more.  The Art of Rise of the Guardians details how these iconic figures were reimagined for the film, along with how the many set pieces – from the North Pole to the Tooth Fairy’s palace – were designed.  The book is written by animation historian Ramin Zahed (also editor-in-chief of Animation Magazine), who provides not only an instructive look at the creative process, but also at how large-scale animated films are conceived, produced, nudged-along, and, finally, let out into the world with the best intentions.

This film is, of course, based on the on-going series of books The Guardians of Childhood by William Joyce.  Regular Jade Sphinx readers are well-aware of our devotion for this illustrator, writer, animator, and filmmaker, who is on his way to becoming something of a 21^st Century Walt Disney.  Joyce provides the preface to the book (Alec Baldwin, the voice of Santa, penned the foreword), where he writes about the Guardians: they have vast, extraordinary domains, they are more than just benign gift-givers, they are great and magnificent heroes who would lay down their lives for innocence and the well-being of children everywhere … It will, I think, make kids believe, and for everyone else, it will remind them of how beautiful and powerful belief can be.

The book then shows everything -- from rough pencil sketches to watercolors to intricate storyboards and special effects shots – a creative team at a world class studio can do to harness that belief.  The Art of Rise of the Guardians is a lavishly illustrated book, but the art is put into perspective by a text showing the creative process.  For instance, we learn that Pitch’s lair is not only influenced by such film noir classics as Orson Welles’ The Lady From Shanghai, but also by Venice, Italy.  As Zahed writes, One couldn’t really pick a more appropriate inspiration for Pitch’s home than the melancholy, sinking city of Venice.  The decrepit walls of Pitch’s palace are sliding into the water, and the interiors are covered with mud.  Set in one of the most haunting and beautiful cities in the world, this gloomy Renaissance-style lair is a reminder of the dark turn the villain’s life took hundreds of years ago.

Though the heroes in Rise of the Guardians all have equal time, of course the star turn is that of Santa Claus, perhaps the most famous and beloved Guardian of them all.  The Art of Rise of the Guardians is strongly recommended for believers in Santa Claus (and you know who you are), animation buffs or simply people interested in how intricately-designed, large-scale movies are made. 

Rise of the Guardians Opens Today

It is not often that an animated film is as thematically rich, filled with fully-rounded characters and as frankly moving as Rise of the Guardians, opening today and based on William Joyce’s Guardians of Childhood series.  While many (if not most) animated films at least achieve a level of sentiment through forced or cheaply manipulative means, Rise presents a level of richness and complexity that is seldom found even in today’s adult film fare.  Rise presents issues of love and loss, life and death, the persistence of memory, the power of belief and the measure of identity; for all of its high spirits and freewheeling shenanigans, there is also a surprising vein of melancholy.  It is a film not to be missed, one that can be savored by both children and adults alike, albeit for different reasons.

The Guardians – both the books and film – represent a dramatic change in Joyce’s oeuvre.  Over the past decades the scope of his stories and the emotional weight of his work have increased in heft and urgency.  Joyce’s early work was often pitched in a minor key – problems, when they existed at all, were usually expelled by an afternoon with friends or by dancing the hokey pokey.  However, life and time have left their mark on the artist, and he has become engaged with larger scale questions, such as the nature of sorrow, the pursuit of happiness and their balance in the lives of both children and adults.

If this sounds weighty for a children’s movie, you haven’t been paying attention.  Joyce’s long-term concern has always been the very alchemy of happiness, how it functions and how it survives.  His is a unique contemporary voice in that he is devoid of irony, sweet in his sincerity, delighted by his passions and fueled by its sense of wonder.

Rise of the Guardians is an independent entity from Joyce’s current, ongoing Guardians of Childhood series.  The book chronicles how the great figures of children’s folklore – Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, and Sandman, among others – band together under the guidance of the Man in the Moon to protect the children of the Earth.  Rise takes place several hundreds of years after the book series, with the Guardians already in place and working as a (somewhat argumentative) team.

Rise is told from the point of view of a new character, Jack Frost, the spirit of winter, who is recruited by the Guardians to join their number in a renewed battled against Pitch – also known as the Boogeyman.  It can be regarded as the final origin story for the Guardians, and the starting point for a series of animated adventures.  (One hopes.)  The screenplay, by David Lindsay-Abaire, skillfully mixes comedy and pathos, as well as action scenes and intimate moments that linger in the memory. 

Rise boasts a charming score by Alexandre Desplat, and a closing song performed by soprano Renee Fleming.  Already, the filmmakers win points for creating an animated fantasy that does not include jarring (and ugly) rap and hip hop numbers, fart jokes and puerile pop cultural references.  In an era of animated films that date badly scant months after they are released, Rise will be entertaining children for decades to come.

Rise features a host of spectacular voice performances, starting with Alec Baldwin as Santa Claus.  Baldwin plays the jolly old elf with a heavy Russian accent (as described by Joyce in the books), and seems to be having so much fun, one wonders if he paid Dreamworks in order to do it.  In what is perhaps a nod to his role as announcer for the New York Philharmonic on WNYC, he often uses the names of Russian composers instead of expletives – most wonderfully thundering “Rimsky Korsakov!” when falling down. 

Hugh Jackman is an amusing, brawling Easter Bunny – a significant change of the character from Joyce’s books.  Where Joyce presents the Bunny as something of a furry Mr. Spock, Jackman’s Bunny is a smart-talking Australian tough guy in constant competition against Baldwin’s Santa.  Their backbiting rivalry is one of the chief joys of the film.

Isla Fisher gives voice to the Tooth Fairy, a role written as sweeter and less formidable than her book counterpart.  This works wonderfully well in the context of the film, her warm accessibility balances the more antic vocalizations of Baldwin and Jackman.

However, the two finest performances in the film belong to Chris Pine as Jack Frost and Jude Law as Pitch.   Pine plays Frost with both an edgy insouciance and a wounded melancholy.  Frost is the spirit of winter, but has no memory of his past or sense of purpose.  Worse still, unlike other Guardians, people cannot see him.  Because children do not believe in him with the same fever as Santa or the Bunny, he is incorporeal and invisible.  There is a moment about midway through the film when he can be seen by a child for the first time that had your correspondent blubbering into coat sleeve – it’s a fine performance that is beautifully animated.

Law as Pitch comes very close to stealing the film – it is simply the best vocal performance in an animated film since Peter O’Toole in Ratatouille.  Law shows remarkable vocal range – sinister, seductive, anguished and afraid.  The filmmakers also changed the visual conception of Pitch from that of the novels for the better: he is quite baroque in Joyce’s books, and in the film he is long and sleek in a flowing robe.  Horse-faced with tiny, yet evil looking teeth and a passel of evil stallions (literally night-mares), Pitch is a remarkable creation.

Of course, there are quibbles.  Rise is directed with energy by Peter Ramsey, but one cannot help but think that under the baton of someone like Brad Bird, Andrew Stanton or Steven Spielberg, what now glows would actually shimmer. The action is, to an aged viewer like myself, sometimes too frenetic by half, and I wish that the art direction mirrored Joyce’s earlier books (like his masterful Santa Calls), but these are all minor carps.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the film is the Frost-Pitch duality.  Both suffer the same problem: they are largely invisible because fewer and fewer children believe in them.  While Frost is wounded by this, his natural inclination is to meet the situation with a sense of fun; Pitch to terrify children into belief.  What Lindsay-Abaire’s screenplay does so beautifully is realize that the existential pain is nearly the same for both.  In his monologues, Pitch is nearly as sympathetic as he is menacing, and Law manages to milk that emotional current beautifully.

Finally, the film also seems to be an assertion of the fundamental tenant of Joyce’s overarching philosophy: that high spirits, a sense of fun and a touch of panache is enough to keep even the darkest spirits at bay.  Let’s hope he’s right.

Rise of the Guardians is the perfect holiday film and comes highly recommended.

Toothiana: Queen of the Tooth Fairy Armies, by William Joyce

It is William Joyce Week here at The Jade Sphinx, as we celebrate two new books in his Guardians of Childhood series, as well as the release of the film Rise of the Guardians.  We’ll focus on the books today and tomorrow, starting with the prose novel Toothiana: Queen of the Tooth Fairy Armies before looking at the picture book The Sandman: The Story of Sanderson Mansnoozie tomorrow.

 

How is the third novel in the series?  In short, Toothiana is an unqualified delight – and easily the best of Joyce’s prose novels to date.  The book is written with Joyce’s customary insouciance and panache, an almost infectious sense of high spirits, fun and adventure.  Perhaps the best way to describe Joyce’s literary voice is to imagine, if you will, The Three Musketeers written by Soupy Sales and you get something close to the effect.  My only complaint is that once the book is done – I want more and I want it now. 

The book continues to chronicle the evolution of various figures of folklore dear to children and how they came about.  In short, the whole series is an origin story: once the entire 12 book series is complete, readers will know how such beloved icons as Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Sandman, Mother Goose and Tooth Fairy came about.  In this installment, Joyce outlines the origins of the Tooth Fairy while moving forward the overarching serial-story of the Guardians and their ongoing battle against Pitch, also known as the Boogeyman. 

The story opens with North (Joyce’s Santa), Bunnymund (the Easter Bunny), Nightlight, the wizard Ombric and the girl Katherine (who, I suspect, will evolve into Mother Goose) celebrating victory over Pitch following the battle at the Earth’s Core.  They travel by rabbit tunnel now to the very top of the world, to visit the Tsar Luna, head of the Luna Lamadary, and his followers who worship the great focus of this fantasy universe, the Man in the Moon.  Once there Katherine looses her last baby tooth, which introduces Toothiana and her dramatic backstory. 

This tale is Joyce at his swashbuckling best.  Toothiana comes complete with invading monkey armies, flying elephants, and enchanted jungles as well as daring rescues and hairbreadth escapes.  It also contains some of Joyce’s most haunting imagery, including the notion that every baby tooth holds within it the memory of a child’s happiness.  Imagine, for instance, an entire flying machine made of children’s teeth, each holding within its pearly whiteness nothing but happy memories…. 

Joyce plants grace notes throughout that make for delightful reading.  One of my favorites is Down below, North’s elves ate plate after plate of jam roly-ply, noodle pudding, and sweet potato schnitzel, topping off the meal with elderberry pie and Bunnymund’s newest chocolates – a delectable blend of Aztec Cacao and purple plum – all the while asking North to describe the meals prepared by the Yetis (accomplished chefs all) at the Lunar Lamadary.  It seemed that being turned to stone and back again was a hungry business.  Or this throwaway: While the children were anticipating their first trip to the Himalayas, Ombric and Bunnymund were in a deep debate about which came first, the chicken or the egg.  Ombric believed it was the chicken.  Bunnymund, not surprisingly, believed it was the egg.  But the Pooka had to admit that he could not answer the question definitively.  Joyce also, as usual, has lots of fun with chapter titles, including the delicious: A Journey Most Confounding, with Flying Monkeys Who Smell Very Bad Indeed. 

Perhaps Joyce’s greatest achievement with this book is his conception of the Tooth Fairy.  His story of her past makes for affecting reading, and Joyce imagines the character into something of an emerald warrior, an almost crystalline vision of beauty concealing an indomitable will.  There are also notes of melancholy throughout, as Joyce flirts with ideas of loss, creeping adulthood and the sense that time irrevocably changes everything, and not always for the better.  These dark notes are never enough to overwhelm the willful giddiness of events and situations, but they are there and give the continuing story its heft and resonance.  Toothiana: Queen of the Tooth Fairy Armies is a triumph.

 

William Joyce Week continues tomorrow with The Sandman.